Effect of adrenergic agonist oral decongestants on blood pressure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Adrenergic agonist oral decongestants are commonly taken daily over long periods of time to relieve sinus and nasal congestion. The mechanism of action of decongestants potentially increases blood pressure, and these effects may be acute or chronic. However, no systematic reviews to date have comprehensively assessed the chronic blood pressure effects of adrenergic agonist oral decongestants as a drug class, despite their widespread non-prescription availability. OBJECTIVES: Primary objective To assess the effects of adrenergic agonist oral decongestants on systolic and diastolic blood pressure compared to placebo. Secondary objective To assess the effects of adrenergic agonist oral decongestants on heart rate and withdrawals due to adverse effects. SEARCH METHODS: The Cochrane Hypertension Information Specialist searched the following databases for randomized controlled trials (RCT) up to July 2024: Cochrane Hypertension Specialised Register, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) via Cochrane Register of Studies, Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid Embase, and ClinicalTrials.gov. There were no language, publication year, or publication status restrictions. SELECTION CRITERIA: We included RCTs of at least seven days' duration with parallel groups (intervention and placebo) comparing adrenergic agonist oral decongestants versus placebo on blood pressure in people aged over six years. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two review authors (JJC and MC) independently assessed the trials for inclusion, extracted the data, and assessed the risk of bias from the included trials. In cases where there were disagreements, the third review author (JMW) adjudicated. For any missing or unclear information in the studies, we contacted the study author to request the missing information or seek clarification. The primary outcomes were systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure. Secondary outcomes were heart rate and withdrawal due to adverse effects. We used a fixed-effect model to combine the effect sizes from all studies. We assessed the certainty of the evidence using GRADE. MAIN RESULTS: = 79%; very low-certainty evidence). Adrenergic agonist oral decongestants may have little to no effect on the number of withdrawals due to adverse effects (risk ratio [RR] 1.20, 95% CI 0.37 to 3.88; 4 RCTs, 806 participants; low-certainty evidence; note 1 study reported withdrawals due to adverse effects but recorded 0 events in both groups. Thus, the RR and CIs were calculated from 3 studies rather than 4). Four studies were at overall high risk of bias, and one study was at overall low risk of bias. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: In this systematic review, chronic daily intake of adrenergic agonist oral decongestants had little to no effect on blood pressure, heart rate, and withdrawals due to adverse effects. People making decisions about using these medicines should consider the very low certainty of evidence and the theoretical risk of increased blood pressure. Independent trials free from biases that are designed to answer this question are required. The evidence was limited due to the small number of studies, and the blood pressure and heart rate not being measured at the optimal time after drug ingestion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Meta-analysis | high |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | high |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".